4.10. Lusitanian

Lusitanian (Lus.) is the fragmentary language attested (ca. 1st c. BC – AD 2nd c.) from five short inscriptions and “quasi-Lusitanian” texts (short Latin inscriptions with isolated Lusitanian forms) of the Lusitani, which, together with onomastic material and divine names and epithets, place-names, and lexical material, have made scholars proposed a Lusitano-Galician group extended over Central-West and North-West Iberia in Pre-Roman times.

Some common traits include (Prósper 1999; Prósper and Villar 2009; Stifter 2018):

· *e raised to mid-high ı before tautosyllabic nasals.

· At least in final syllables *-ei→Lus. ē.

· Lowering of *oto *u in contact with occlusives or labial nasals; *ōto *ū, at least in final syllable.

· There is an example of ou < *eu, but there are others in eu, which separates the language from Italic.

· Voiceless stops become voiced (“lenited”) between vowels and after resonants (*t→d, *k→ g) but this did not attain phonemic status: dialectally restricted to the north, and temporarily to later stages.

· Probable (at least dialectal) trend to the loss of *s in final position, maybe only when preceded by long vowel or when preconsonantal. Supported by possible aspiration initially and medially.

· Palatalisation of group *-ki̯- →šrepresented as <S>.

· General output of syllabic *n̥→an-. Loss of nasals before fricatives.

· No merge of *ku̯ and *kw, which sets it apart from West Indo-European languages: *kw→Lus. p, *ku̯→Lus. qu; cf. Iccona <*Ekkwona, comparable to Gaul. equine goddess Epona. It is unclear how the evolution *eku̯o-→ *ekku̯o- → *ekko- → ikko- (similar to Proto-Greek) affected the whole territory, but it seems that the absortion of -u̯-did not reach the northern regions of Callaecia and the Conventus Asturum.

The earliest expansion of a Lusitano-Galician group, based on the known distribution of onomastic and toponymic materials, may be related to the expansion of statue-menhirs in the north-east (around the Minho and Douro, up to the Tagus River) and anthropomorphic stelae in the south-west (around the Tagus, Guadiana, and Guadalquivir rivers) from the mid–2nd millennium BC. The lack of typical changes in common with West Indo-European dialects, and its clear origin in the North-West Indo-European community, puts its expansion in parallel with that of Italo-Celtic, hence probably in the late 3rd millennium BC.